Category: Commentary
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Succeed With Canadian Careers In Democracy
Career Lessons From Nathalie Des Rosiers, formerly of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association Canadian careers in democracy are honourable aspirations. Protecting freedom of expression and thought. The right to peaceful assembly. In Canada we take these things for granted. Our safety net? The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, plus related laws. (Note: I originally…
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Micro Flying Craft Instead of Cabs?
Mini-Copters To The Rescue? To soar like an eagle over traffic jams. Sounds like a Utopian dream. This concept works beautifully — until there’s more than one of these gyro birdies flying over a city. Then a few more. Soon hundreds. After that, what, thousands?Congestion on streets with cars is one thing. In our skies…
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Let AI Choose Your Babysitter – Not!
Predictim Halts Launch But Raises Alarms. Who wouldn’t want AI to choose which babysitter you hire? Predictim thought it was such a great idea it staked its business model on it. “Piece of mind for families” is their comforting motto. At Least They’re Honest About Questionable Claims Except their Disclaimer reads like a damned dismissal of…
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First Experience With A Cover Designer On Fiverr Was Meh
NEEDED A MOCKUP JUST TO SEE HOW IT MIGHT LOOK So…my first experience with a cover designer on Fiverr. In one word: bleh. In good part it was my fault, because I was in a hurry and didn’t want to spend more than $150 Cdn total for all four unique cover designs, which are only…
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Some Pros & Cons of HootSuite for Managing My Social Media Posts
So, been using HootSuite for a while to help me centrally manage my social media postings. It’s tagline is, after all, “Manage all your social media in one place.” Thing is I have mixed opinions about this tool. It does enable me to organize my Tweets, Posts and Updates in a more organized way. But…
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How I Increased My Twitter Impressions 2,000% vs. Month Ago
My initial #pre-marketing efforts are bearing fruit. As a novice novelist-in-process I consider Twitter a key social media property. @MarkDSwartz is gaining some traction. Here’s how I increased twitter organic impressions 2,000 percent over a 28 day period, May to June 2017. Not Starting From Scratch Note that I’d worked like crazy with the group…
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Deciding On My Social Media Strategy
Of all the pre-writing promotional tactics at my beck and call, deciding on my social media strategy tops the list. Which for me is kind of a shame, since I’m not thrilled about the constant self-boasting – and artificially polished imagery – that saturates the web. Is this something of a blasphemous statement given the…
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Have Started Novel Pre-Writing In Earnest
And so it begins. The adventure I’d been forced to defer for years is upon me. My keyboard is getting a workout. There’s the 15 pages of “What If’s” to help spark plot and character concepts. Another 10 pages of “Starting Stuff,” in which I outline my idealized reader (curious and open minded, like ME),…
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Aziz Ansari Find Funny in Empathy
How encouraging to see that empathy – the understanding and sharing of emotions and experiences of another person (Merriam-Webster.com) – is a focus in the upcoming Netflix sitcom Master of None. In an age of Twitter storms and social shouting, does it sometimes feel that listening-to-understand gets quashed? I, for one, would love to see…
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Finally I have my branding: CoFictions
It took a while but I’ve decided to use CoFictions as the primary branding for my fiction self-publishing endeavors. It captures the essence of targeting specific category readers (and their particular genres) in ways that broaden the reach of a an individual work of fiction. Can’t say more than that for now or I’ll let…